Service Orientation and the Smart Grid state and trends

The energy market is undergoing major changes, the most notable of which is the transition from a hierarchical closed system toward a more open one highly based on a “smart” information-rich infrastructure. This transition calls for new information and communication technologies infrastructures and standards to support it. In this paper, we review the current state of affairs and the actual technologies with respect to such transition. Additionally, we highlight the contact points between the needs of the future grid and the advantages brought by service-oriented architectures.

VOLARE: Adaptive Web Service Discovery Middleware for Mobile Systems

With the recent advent and widespread use of smart mobile devices, the flexibility and versatility offered by Service Oriented Architecture's (SOA) makes it an ideal approach to use in the rapidly changing mobile environment. However, the mobile setting presents a set of new challenges that service discovery methods developed for nonmobile environments cannot address. The requirements a mobile client device will have from a Web service may change due to changes in the context or the resources of the client device. In a similar manner, a mobile device that acts as a Web service provider will have different capabilities depending on its status, which may also change dramatically during runtime. This paper introduces VOLARE, a middleware-based solution that will monitor the resources and context of the device, and adapt service requests accordingly. The same method will be used to adapt the Quality of Service (QoS) levels advertised by service providers, to realistically reflect each provider's capabilities at any given moment. This approach will allow for more resource-efficient and accurate service discovery in mobile systems and will enable more reliable provider functionality in mobile devices

Domain Objects and Microservices for Systems Development: a roadmap

This paper discusses a roadmap to investigate Domain Objects being an adequate formalism to capture the peculiarity of microservice architecture, and to support Software development since the early stages. It provides a survey of both Microservices and Domain Objects, and it discusses plans and reflections on how to investigate whether a modeling approach suited to adaptable service-based components can also be applied with success to the microservice scenario

Composition and Self-Adaptation of Service-Based Systems with Feature Models

The adoption of mechanisms for reusing software in pervasive systems has not yet become standard practice. This is because the use of pre-existing software requires the selection, composition and adaptation of prefabricated software parts, as well as the management of some complex problems such as guaranteeing high levels of efficiency and safety in critical domains. In addition to the wide variety of services, pervasive systems are composed of many networked heterogeneous devices with embedded software. In this work, we promote the safe reuse of services in service-based systems using two complementary technologies, Service-Oriented Architecture and Software Product Lines. In order to do this, we extend both the service discovery and composition processes defined in the DAMASCo framework, which currently does not deal with the service variability that constitutes pervasive systems. We use feature models to represent the variability and to self-adapt the services during the composition in a safe way taking context changes into consideration. We illustrate our proposal with a case study related to the driving domain of an Intelligent Transportation System, handling the context information of the environment.Work partially supported by the projects TIN2008-05932, TIN2008-01942, TIN2012-35669, TIN2012-34840 and CSD2007-0004 funded by Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and FEDER; P09-TIC-05231 and P11-TIC-7659 funded by Andalusian Government; and FP7-317731 funded by EU. Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

XSACd—Cross-domain resource sharing & access control for smart environments

Computing devices permeate working and living environments, affecting all aspects of modern everyday lives; a trend which is expected to intensify in the coming years. In the residential setting, the enhanced features and services provided by said computing devices constitute what is typically referred to as a “smart home”. However, the direct interaction smart devices often have with the physical world, along with the processing, storage and communication of data pertaining to users’ lives, i.e. private sensitive in nature, bring security concerns into the limelight. The resource-constraints of the platforms being integrated into a smart home environment, and their heterogeneity in hardware, network and overlaying technologies, only exacerbate the above issues. This paper presents XSACd, a cross-domain resource sharing & access control framework for smart environments, combining the well-studied fine-grained access control provided by the eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) with the benefits of Service Oriented Architectures, through the use of the Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS). Based on standardized technologies, it enables seamless interactions and fine-grained policy-based management of heterogeneous smart devices, including support for communication between distributed networks, via the associated MQ Telemetry Transport protocol (MQTT)–based proxies. The framework is implemented in full, and its performance is evaluated on a test bed featuring relatively resource-constrained smart platforms and embedded devices, verifying the feasibility of the proposed approac

Everyday disasters, stagnation and the normalcy of non-development: Roghun Dam, a flood, and campaigns of forced taxation in southern Tajikistan

This article conducts a comparative analysis of a catastrophic flood that hit the Kulob region of southern Tajikistan in 2010, and the government of Tajikistan’s campaign to gather money to build the Roghun dam and hydropower station. It advances the notion of ‘everyday disasters’ in order to explain the imprecise boundaries between major catastrophic events and more mundane dimensions of the everyday as experienced by residents of Kulob. The article seeks to shed light, firstly, on the processes that underpin both Kulob residents’ experiences of stagnation and the normalization of non-development, and, secondly, on the ways in which Kulob residents joke and ‘do’ cunning/cheating whilst dealing with disastrous events in order to cultivate an everydayness that is worth living

Enabling an Agile Information Supply Chain in Service Oriented Architectures with Web Services

The Information Systems (IS) leadership in enterprises share common pervasive agility issues associated with corporate data management, such as providing access when and where needed, data validation and integrity issues, analyzing data housed in disparate systems, and reporting consolidated data to applicable parties. To address these problems some organizations are employing Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) as a paradigm, which is enhanced by the use of web services, to provide a lightweight means of leveraging resources. The Federal Financial Institutions Examinations Council (FFIEC) is one such organization and we use the traditional systems analysis and design (SAD) approach to frame how the FFIEC employed SOA as a new paradigm of conducting business with web services. We provide lessons learned that are concerned with initiating SOA with web services in order to achieve an agile information supply chain

A model introducing SOAs quality attributes decomposition

International audienceRecently, service oriented architecture (SOA) has been popularized with the emergence of standards like Web services. Nevertheless, the shift to this architectural paradigm could potentially involve significant risks including projects abandonments. With this in mind, the question of evaluating SOA quality arose. The appearance of methods like ATAM or SAAM propelled software architecture evaluation to a standard stage for any paradigm. However, there still are a number of concerns that have been raised with these methods; in particular their cost in terms of time and money, essentially because of the hand-operated nature of the evaluations conducted. The model proposed in this paper for evaluating SOAs takes as a starting point the McCall model; it allows the whole architecture to be decomposed in three types of quality attributes (factor, criterion and metric

Factors Affecting The Adoption Of Service Oriented Architectures

Service-orientated architecture is a very popular approach for building large scale, modular and distributed systems as well as achieving integration in heterogeneous environments. Its acceptance in the world of business is growing over time, mainly in technologically advanced countries, but there are still research gaps regarding SOA adoption and diffusion process. Interesting research questions include which factors drive SOA adoption, e.g. whether it is related to specific attributes of organizations. In this research-in-progress paper, we present a research model for identifying and validating the factors affecting SOA adoption in business contexts. Our model takes into consideration both theoretical background regarding factors of impact on IT innovations adoption and factors closely related to specific SOA characteristics. Our research is at a preliminary stage and thus we also present, the research methodology we intend to follow, in order to come up with results and confirm hypotheses